Because of your #3, that means they had some time. Rather than torpedo something that was still a bit of a success, if no longer a moon shot, they could have innovated something new alongside the existing product. Either a compelling new feature or a separate product that was able to leverage their huge data set. Their users were delighted by the existing product, but they ignored their users in order to go with the torpedo route. Clearly they had never read anything by Paul Graham?